


von Gelsenkirchen nach Brasilien (und zurück)

by BoomXhakalaka, meyretzkas



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Friends to Lovers, M/M, Phone Sex, Rio 2016 Olympics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 11:01:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10096067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BoomXhakalaka/pseuds/BoomXhakalaka, https://archiveofourown.org/users/meyretzkas/pseuds/meyretzkas
Summary: Max kisses Leon the night before they fly out to compete in the Olympics together. Leon takes him back to his place.....and then somewhere along the way, they realise they love each other.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title (hopefully) translates into "from Gelsenkirchen to Brazil (and back)".
> 
> I might have taken liberties with the scheduling/travel details and the like, forgive me, it's fiction. 
> 
> I've been very AWOL while I deal with some mental health issues which are the reason I took this semester off school, but this fic was my "baby" for a while and I figured I should try and finish it. I struggled with it and K was kind enough to help me out so much that she actually turned a lot of my dot points into actual story for me when I was too sad to write and this ended up a joint effort. I know you want to remain largely anon with your writing, but I had to credit you. Thank you for everything.

It's a joke how clichéd it is, but it all begins when Max's foot rolls in on itself as he steps down from the sidewalk to the pavement next to Leon's car after eating a late dinner at an Italian restaurant they both love. Instead of finding himself on the ground with bruised pride and a broken ankle the night before flying out to the Olympics, Max finds himself in Leon's arms from where his best friend had caught him. Max will never understand how Leon managed to see what was about to happen and react quickly enough to catch him, but he somehow did.

And that's how Max found himself in a backstreet of Gelsenkirchen with Leon's arms around him and breathing in the smell of his expensive cologne and the feel of his hard muscles underneath his plaid shirt.

Max can blame almost falling over for ending up in Leon's arms, but he can't really blame that for the way he takes one of his hands to fist in Leon's shirt and pull his best friend down to kiss him.

That can be blamed on the fact that Max has wanted to do that for about fifteen months now, ever since he had this epiphany moment in training one day early last spring when Leroy had leaned into him and told him that it wasn't normal for him to stare at Leon's ass the way he did. Max tried to claim he didn't but it was pointless because, well, he _did_ stare at his best friend's ass quite a bit. Truth be told, Max liked the idea of Leon fucking him, and it was something he’d thought of a few times when jerking himself off in his own bed or shower. Leon was bi as well and in spite of his short stature, Max knew he was far from unattractive, so it wasn't a far fetched fantasy, except for the fact that Leon probably counted as his best friend, and Max didn't want to mess that up.

When Leon caught him, he didn't let go of Max straight away like he could have. Instead, his fingers were still firmly gripping Max's arms so tight that Max could feel it through the leather of his jacket, and little fireworks were erupting under the skin where Leon’s fingers dug into him.

Max blames that for triggering something in him that made him ignore his better judgement and act on all those months of attraction to his best friend. He pulls Leon towards him kisses him and it's somehow even better than he thought it would be…………except for the way Leon pushes him away after a few seconds. That was never a part of the fantasies that had played out in Max’s mind as he lie sprawled in his bed or standing against the wall of his shower.

Max instantly tries to put a nonchalant expression on his face, because if Leon wasn't into it, Max didn't want him thinking he cared enough to feel bothered by it. Because he totally didn't. That would mean _like-liking_ Leon and Max didn't do feelings like that. He just liked to fuck and Leon had a great body and was a cool person with a cute smile and Max found him attractive. Max liked to fuck attractive people. It was as simple as that, really. Some might say he had a crush on Leon, it was something Leroy had teased him about before, but Max just told them to shut up. It was easier to do that than admit Leroy might be right.

"Not here," Leon says, gesturing with a hand even though there was no one else in sight because it was a Monday night on a quiet side street in an area people didn’t really go, unless they were looking for the same restaurant.

Despite breaking off the kiss, Leon is still holding Max with his other arm, which is confusing as fuck.

He looks up to see Leon biting his bottom lip nervously before speaking again.

"But.....I don't have to take you home......you could come back to my place?"

Max smiles more broadly than he wanted for someone still trying to play it cool and mildly disinterested as he nods enthusiastically.

Leon smiles back at him and releases Max from his grasp so he can climb into the passenger side of Leon's car.

The drive back to Leon's place doesn't take long and is in comfortable silence, other than Leon's occasional complaints about Max changing the songs on the playlist halfway through, muttering that his friend needs to do something about his ADHD. After the 4th time, Max flips him off and Leon laughs at him, flashing him the cooked smile that always makes Max smile right back at him. It doesn't stop him fiddling with the music though. It's a thing he does and can't stop doing and he suspects Leon doesn't mind so much as he just enjoys lightly teasing Max.

Once they're inside the door of Leon’s house, they hesitate for a moment. Leon has a nervous look on his face, so Max decides to just go for it, pushing Leon up against his door and kissing him again, deeper and open mouthed this time now he knows Leon wants it enough to have invited him back for it. Max might not have the height or size needed to truly pin someone as tall as Leon up against the door, but it didn't really matter when it was more about showing his friend that he had no reason to think he'd read the situation wrong.

"You seriously want this?" Leon asks shyly, like he still can't believe Max really just kissed him, even though it is the reason his voice is breathless.

"For way too long," Max admits. It was more than he intended to put on the table, but it doesn't really matter, not when Leon's response is a smile before leaning down to kiss Max again.

"OK. Good. Me too," Leon says, grabbing Max by the wrist and pulling him though the hallway and upstairs into his bedroom.

-*-

Leon wakes up the next morning with Max’s arm draped over him as his friend continues to sleep lying on his stomach with a leg hanging over the edge of the bed. He had no idea how Max was actually comfortable in that position because it seemed to be twisting his shoulder strangely, but he’d seen Max sleep in some even more uncomfortable positions over the years.

Leon had no idea what was going to happen now.

He’d innocently enough fallen asleep in the same bed with Max more times than he could count over the years they'd known each other. It had never been weird, even with the sexual tension that had seemed to build up between them over the eighteen months or so, right when Max started to go from cute to hot and Leon's dick _noticed_.

But this was the first time he’d fallen asleep in the same bed as Max after they’d tore each other’s clothes off, made out like sixteen year olds, and given each other blow jobs.

Leon had no idea how Max was going to feel about it when he woke up, and that kinda scared him.

Sure, he said he’d wanted to kiss Leon for ages and admitted to him when in his room that he'd thought about Leon sucking his dick before, but that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t wake up and regret it……or even worse, think Leon was disappointingly awful at it.

Leon sighs and carefully manages to wriggle himself out from underneath Max’s arm, his friend stirring slightly but thankfully remaining asleep. Leon has had more than enough experience with Max’s morning crankiness to want to risk waking him before he was ready, especially when he doesn’t know if Max is going to wake up with a bunch of regrets.

Leon looks down at Max sprawled face down on his bed, naked and asleep, the comforter hanging mostly on the floor. Leon he allows himself a moment to admire Max’s ass before heading into the bathroom, because well, it’s not like anyone has to know and even if they did, who could blame him?

Max has a fantastic ass that looks even better naked than in jeans or football shorts.

Leon looks at his reflection and sees his hair sticking up and curling even more than it usually does in the morning, probably the result of Max tugging on it last night as Leon was between his legs, working his cock with his mouth.

It is with that thought that Leon turns around and steps into the shower while cursing himself for being a twenty-one year old guy because all it takes to get his dick half hard is a fucking flashback of being between Max’s legs, and the part later when Max climbed into his lap and straddled his hips, fingers tangled messily in his hair to pull Leon’s head up towards him so he can crash their lips together.

Max will be asleep until the last possible moment, so it’s not like Max ever has to know that it’s still having this effect on him the next morning.

Leon wraps a hand around his dick and it’s embarrassing how quickly he comes to the thought of Max’s fingers in his hair, and the kisses and marks Max would have left on his neck, and the way he fucking looked up and winked at Leon halfway through sucking him off.

Who even does that? Well, his best friend does it seems, and it was something Leon definitely wanted a repeat of. Only problem was that he had no clue if that was something Max wanted.

Leon slumps to the shower floor and lets the hot water wash over him for a few minutes before turning the water off and stepping outside to towel off his hair and put some gel in it, because there's no way he is going to the airport with messy curls when there were going to be photographers everywhere.

It is only when he is done that he realises he has no clothes to put on since he came in to the bathroom naked.

It seems strange to suddenly be self conscious about his dick when Max had literally had it in his mouth a few hours earlier but there was the possibility Max might wake up feeling weird about it and not welcome the sight of Leon walking around naked.

He walks out into his bedroom with the towel around his hips and sees Max (…..and his ass. _fuck_.) still asleep on his bed. Leon grabs a pair of clean boxers from his drawer and puts on the Olympic Team sweatpants and shirt he’d been issued to wear to the airport. He picks up his phone from the nightstand, carefully avoiding Max’s outstretched arm, and heads out into the kitchen in search of food.

Leon starts a pot of coffee and begins to toast a couple of bagels before picking up his phone to scroll though the stack of “good luck” messages he’s been sent before flying out to Rio.

“Please tell me one of those bagels is for me, I’m so fucking hungry, I'm going to _die_ ”.

Leon turns around to see Max standing in the kitchen doorway wearing one of Leon’s hoodies that he must have found on the floor of his room. It was about two sizes too big for him and Leon had never really gotten the “ _seeing someone wearing your clothes_ ” kink until this moment. There was something about the way the hoodie was a third of the way down Max’s thighs and the "8" and "LG" on the breast, and the thought of ‘ _is he even wearing anything underneath it?_ ’ that was doing things to Leon and making his throat go dry.

“I suppose I could be nice and feed you,” Leon manages to say, turning back to the toaster and putting the two bagels on a plate and handing it out to Max. He crosses the room with a smile that makes Leon a little weak in the knees as his takes the plate from his hands, the small accidental brush of Max’s fingers enough to make Leon have to swallow.

“Take whatever you want from the fridge,” he tells Max with a smile before turning back to the toaster to put in another two bagels for himself. It would be weird to stare at the toaster for five minutes, so he turns around and is greeted by the sight of Max rifling through his fridge.

He hates the way he catches himself thinking it would be nice to have this sight in his kitchen more often.

Thankfully Leon isn’t left with a lot of time to think about it, as Max closes the fridge empty handed and looks at Leon with a confused look.

“No Nutella? Seriously?”

“That’s because you don’t keep Nutella in the fridge, you idiot,” Leon says with a chuckle. He walks over to the cupboard where he keeps the Nutella he almost never eats because it’s something like 99.75% sugar and he was a professional athlete who is supposed to eat well.

He holds the jar out to Nutella before taking it back again.

“Wait. You want Nutella for breakfast?” he asks Max because, seriously? They're going to the _Olympics_ today and Max wants to eat a plate full of Nutella?

Max shrugs at him nonchalantly. “We can’t all have perfect hot fucking Adonis bodies, some of us accept being a little soft in order to have the goodness that is Nutella...…..now hand it over Goretzka”.

Leon could swear Max looked him up and down while saying it.

Any bit of resistance Leon might have had is shot to hell with the realisation that Max basically just said that his body was hot and perfect......and that brought back memories of Max kissing random patches of skin on his chest the night before as he worked his way down to Leon’s boxers.

Leon swallows, willing his body to _stopfuckingdoingthis_  as he weakly hands the Nutella over to Max, who thanks him with a killer smile and a “ _dankeschön_ ” before taking the jar and his plate into the dining room.

Leon sighs deeply and runs a hand through his hair at the sight of Max walking away in his hoodie, carrying the food Leon made for him.

It was…..nice.

And it was weird.

There was something kinda......domestic about Max wearing his clothes and looking in his fridge and even arguing like an old married couple with him over Max basically eating chocolate for breakfast.

It was confusing.

Max hadn’t said a single word to acknowledge what had happened last night and even if he had, Leon is twenty-one and Max is still just twenty. They're too young for this. 

Leon isn’t supposed to think like this. He’s supposed to like clubbing and cars and messing around with different people, not the thought of having Max waking up in his house all the time. And hell, even if Leon let himself like the idea of playing house with Max and kissing him every morning, Max had a fairly deserved playboy reputation so it wouldn't be a mutual desi......

“Leeeeeeon,”

Well.

That is one way to snap Leon out of his brain and all his stupid thoughts.

Leon walks over to the door and looks over at Max, who is sitting at the table.

“Can you bring me a knife when you come in here? I forgot one”.

Max didn’t forget, Leon wasn’t thinking and didn’t offer him one, which made him a crappy post sex host.

“Yeah, of course,” Leon says, turning back into the kitchen as the kettle beeped to announce it was finished heating up the water.

Leon pours coffee into a mug, adding the right amount of sugar and milk that he knows Max likes, biting back a laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. Of course he knows how his best friend takes his coffee. They've spent far too much time together of the last couple of years that is almost weird how many little stupid things they know about each other, like coffee preferences, and how Max somehow manages to sleep comfortably even when contorted like a Russian rhythmic gymnast.

Leon takes the cup and the requested knife out to Max.

“You’re not going to have breakfast yourself?” Max asks with a frown when he notice's Leon's hands are empty other than the knife and a cup of coffee which he sits down in front of him.

“I am now, I just would have dropped something if I tried to bring it all in at once so I brought your stuff first”.

Max takes a sip of his coffee.

It’s exactly the way Max likes it.

Leon can usually read Max like a book, but the expression on his face is completely unreadable this time.

Leon studies him for a moment or two before giving up trying to comprehend it. He turns around and heads back into the kitchen for his own bagels and coffee and he briefly considers getting some low fat spread for his bagels but decides to just have the Nutella too.

He sits down across from Max, picking up the knife and dips it into the Nutella and spreads some on his bagels.

He looks up to see Max smirking at him.

“Shut the fuck up,” Leon says, but the words betray his face, because there’s no annoyance in his expression or tone, just a wry smile playing at the corners of his lips.

“I didn’t say anything,” Max shoots right back, smirk still on his face.

Well. Yeah. He didn’t say anything.

And that’s sort of the problem right now isn't it?

Max keeps the smirk for a few more moments, before taking a bite of his bagel and eating the rest of his breakfast in silence.

Well, OK then.

If Max doesn’t want to talk about it and would prefer to pretend it never happened, that’s fine, but the goddamn motherfucker could have at least put his own clothes back on instead of getting around in Leon’s hoodie and probably nothing else.

When Max is done eating, he asks Leon if he can use the shower and Leon tell him where to find the spare towels and that he'll take care of the plates.

Max goes upstairs into the Leon’s room and bathroom while Leon uses the time to put the plates and cups into the dishwasher and take his bags down into the car.

He tries to think of the best way to non awkwardly apologise to Max for whatever he did wrong last night to make him not want to talk about it at all. He just prays that if he thought Leon was crap in bed, that he has the decency to not tell Niklas and Julian and everyone on the team so Leon can at least try and keep some of his pride and dignity intact for the month or so they'll be in Brazil. 

But he also doesn't think he'd have been.....bad. At least, no one he's ever slept with has seemed to suggest it, they’ve always seemed pretty….satisfied with Leon's performances, so Leon is at a complete loss as to why Max would think it. Maybe he has really high standards from the.....sheer number of people he's fucked over the years.

Leon doesn't want to think about that, even though he has no real right to be jealous. Max is an adult who can do whatever and whoever he wants.

When Leon comes back inside from taking the last bag out, he finds Max standing in the living room slightly awkwardly, like he isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do now. He’s wearing the clothes he wore to dinner the night before. For someone who spent the entire duration of breakfast feeling personally victimised by Max wearing his hoodie, Leon suddenly feels strangely disappointed it's no longer on Max's body, in some weird twisted ‘ _don’t know what you got til it’s gone_ ’ sort of thing.

They’d decided last night before…...the _thing_ happened that they’d drive to the airport together since there was no point in both of them taking a car and putting it in airport parking when they’d be coming back together at the same time.

“We should go pick up your stuff and head off to the airport?” Leon asks. 

Max looks relieved that Leon has taken control of the awkwardness, answering “okay" in a grateful tone of voice, and Leon smiles at him and gestures that they should go.

Max only lives a few minutes away and there’s not really time for it to become awkward as they drive, but Leon decides not to tease Max for changing the songs, just in case he's feeling weird around Leon and wouldn't want him to do it this time. Leon doesn't really know what is "normal" now. He guesses that's why people say you shouldn't have sex with your best friend, but it was _Max_ , and he was honestly powerless to resist when it was Max kissing him.

They pull up at Max’s place and of course, none of his shit is packed because Max always leaves everything for the last possible moment. Max had been planning to do it this morning but the whole “waking up in Leon’s bed” thing changed his plans and the most he had accomplished is having emptied his suitcase from his holiday to Miami the month before.

Resultantly, the next ten minutes see Max frantically shoving things into the suitcase and another five minutes of panic of where they are both searching for his passport, which Leon finds in the pocket of a discarded pair of jeans at the bottom of the stairs.

Leon doesn’t want to think about why a pair of Max’s boxers and jeans are at the bottom of his stairs on the floor, but well, they basically left clothes strewn all over the place at Leon's house last night so whatever. It was just more that Leon wanted Max to only want to do that with him, not other guys or girls.

“Oh god, what would I do without you?” Max says, relief on his face as Leon holds the maroon passport up for him to see.

“We good to go?” Leon asks and Max nods. Leon takes Max's messenger bag from him, freeing up Max's right hand for him pull his suitcase behind him through the hallway.

Right before they are about to reach the front door, Max finally cracks.

“Leon, wait........we should talk……..you know, about last night and stuff”.

Leon carefully sets Max’s bag down on the floor, knowing that Max's laptop and ipad are inside it. He turns around to face Max, bracing himself for the inevitable rejection and regret Max was about to dish out to him.

But when Leon looks at Max, he looks a little shy and nervous. Max isn’t a shy person as a rule but like anyone, he had his moments of being a little self conscious and unsure. But they were never with Leon and it’s a world away from the Max of about twelve hours ago who dragged Leon down by his shirt and kissed him with all the confidence in the world.

Just as Leon is starting to think that Max regrets the whole thing, Max take a couple of steps towards him and Leon feels fingers around his wrist before he sees Max reaching out to him. He looks down at Max who still looks a little nervous, but is smiling at him with the same fond expression he had on his face before kissing him the night before.

“So…..I don’t know about you but…..this thing last night. Definitely liked it. Definitely the best blow job of my life. Definitely would be up for it again…...I mean, if you’re up for that and if not, it’s cool, we’re still friends right, I mean like, doesn’t everyone have a friend they hooked up with once and it’s just a thing they never do again or talk about…..but maybe I’m wrong but it felt like you were into it too, you were kinda gone at parts so like….I don’t know I…..”

Max has never been a babbler, at least not as far as Leon knows, he's never seen it happen. But Max is blushing harder and looking more nervous with every word that falls from his lips. He really doesn’t need to be because Leon was definitely on the same page, maybe even more than Max was.

So Leon reverses the roles from the night before and leans down to shut up Max with a kiss.

When Leon pulls back, the smile on Max’s face tells him everything that he needs to know.

They’re OK.

They’re more than OK.

"We can definitely do it again," Leon says with a smile before continuing. "And your blow job skills are pretty respectable as well, just for the record, I was pretty damn into it". 

Max bites his lip sheepishly and climbs up onto the tip of his toes to kiss Leon again and _wow ok then_ , if that is what a soft kiss from Max feels like, then Leon has been missing out for the last three years or however long he could have had this for, because he’s pretty sure his knees have never felt quite so weak and unsteady. 

“We should go,” Max says reluctantly after pulling back, and a glance at Leon's phone tells him that Max is right, they should have left Gelsenkirchen 15 minutes ago.

They make the two and a half hour road trip to Frankfurt airport listening to music and talking about the things they want to see in Brazil and Max’s theories on who Brandt was going to try and hook up with first and how it better not be Leon he had his eyes set on because Max is calling dibs on all the blow jobs Leon is willing to give out in Rio.

Max’s hand rests on Leon’s thigh as he drives, and Leon pretends to find it annoying when way Max keeps changing the songs halfway through again and again.

-*-

“This whole situation kinda fucking sucks you know”.

Leon looks over at Max with a confused look because he thought the last 18 hours or so have been pretty fucking awesome. His highly attractive best friend who he had a bit of a crush on had kissed him, blown him, woken up in his bed and then told him that the blow job Leon had given him was the best one he'd ever been on the receiving end of and that they should definitely keep doing it.

Leon couldn't find anything to complain about.

"We're going to be stuck on this plane for, what, thirteen hours? But I really want the first of those many _many_ repeats of last night we were talking about....." Max says with the puppy dog eyes that Leon hasn't been able to say no to since the day he met Max back when they were babyfaced teenagers.

Leon sighs, closing his eyes and sinking back into his seat while Max smirks at him, pleased to have gotten Leon's interest.

This was going to be the longest thirteen hours of Leon's life to date.

Against his better judgement, Leon looks over at Max and is greeted by the sight of his best friend giving him a look that Leon knows perfectly well means " _so, what are you waiting for then?"._

"We're not having plane sex, Max," Leon says with a frustrated sigh.

"And why the hell not?".

Leon looks at Max with a disbelieving look, because surely he isn't so stupid he can't understand why Leon doesn't think it's a smart idea.

“Because I learned something about you last night….….you’re fucking loud when getting off”.

“So? You seem to like it,” Max says with an amused smirk.

“Never said I didn’t,” Leon says, mentally willing his dick not to respond to this conversation because the last thing he needed was a boner on a long haul flight. “As much as I’d enjoy it, I don’t think the entire plane really wants to hear you screaming out my name……and I’d definitely have you screaming my name again,” he explains to Max, who bites his lip, his eyes instantly darkening.

“You never know,” Max says. "Maybe they'll enjoy it. I'm sure Brandt would be intrigued by it, I really did hear he was going to try to hook up with you in Brazil you know?".

Leon chooses to ignore the second part of Max's comment because he wasn't all that interested in fucking Julian Brandt in the first place, but especially not now he had Max willing to have an arrangement with him that would hopefully last well after the Olympics.

“You can make all the noise you want in our room in Brazil, in fact, I encourage it, but we’re not having plane bathroom sex, I'm the captain, I have to at least pretend I have it together,” Leon says firmly.

“Fine,” Max says, reaching over to casually rest his hand on Leon’s thigh, looking up to make sure no one was looking before tracing his fingers up, resting dangerously close to Leon's groin.

“You know, I’m going to hold you to that as soon as we’re alone in our room” Max says with a light squeeze of Leon's upper thigh. 

Leon doesn’t protest.

"You do that, Max, I look forward to it," Leon says, struggling to keep his voice steady. 

-*-

They're finally alone in their room in Brazil and fucking exhausted. Leon is lying in his bed, already half asleep when he hears the bathroom door open and Max’s footsteps padding across the room.

A few moments later, Leon feels his bed sink and the weight and feel of Max's warm naked body pressing up against his back.

“Move the fuck over,” Max says.

“I thought you were tired,” Leon says, but his tone is easy and he obliges Max by shifting over in the bed.

The bed wasn’t made with two people in mind, but they still fit into it, albeit with their bodies pressed tightly together. There is nowhere for Max’s arm other than across Leon. Max is pressed right up against his back and Leon can feel the rise and fall of Max's chest as he breathes behind him.

Leon had barely been able to hide his own frequent yawns ever since they landed, but the long flight had taken it out of Max even more. Max had been complaining about being exhausted ever since they landed as well as all through the team dinner, culminating with Max almost falling asleep on Leon in the post dinner team briefing.

That considered, Leon didn’t really think Max would want to fuck right now despite the promises he had made on the plane.

“I'm fucking exhausted, but I want to sleep here, you know, with you” Max explains as if it is the most simple and obvious thing in the world, pressing a kiss to the bare skin of Leon’s shoulder.

“OK,” Leon replies and it's as simple as that.

Leon falls asleep even quicker than he expected, Max wrapped around him like a koala.

When Leon wakes up in the morning and tries to wriggle out from the bed without waking Max up, he doesn’t succeed.

But Leon doesn’t get the annoyed morning reaction he was expecting, but rather, Max pushes him back down, and with a smirk and shifts to climb on top of Leon and straddle him, knees spread on either side of Leon's body.

“Hi".

“Hi yourself," Leon replies with an easy smile.

Max smirks and leans down to kiss him, stopping only when Leon lightly pushes Max off him to complain about his morning breath and telling him to go brush his teeth before kissing him because "you're gross, Meyer".

Max rolls his eyes at Leon.

“Just trying to wake you up the proper way Goretzka, but fine, I bet your dick won’t complain about it,” he says, kicking the rest of the comforter off the bed onto the floor and sliding down Leon’s body, leaving a trail of random kisses as he goes and lightly swatting at Leon's hips to make him raise them to take his boxers off.

Leon definitely doesn’t complain about it as Max takes his dick into his mouth, any complaints he may have had quickly turning into moans as he fists a hand in the sheets and another in the curls of Max’s hair.

-*-

While it might seem like everything is suddenly different between them, not much actually changes between Leon and Max.

They still automatically sit next to each other on the bus and make stupid snaps with each other and shadow each other at training to the point that they get teased a little for being “married” by some of their teammates. They still steal from each other’s plates, shove each other affectionately and share playlists the same way they have for the last three years.

They just insert blowjobs and shared showers and purposely falling asleep naked in the same bed in between the friendship they already had, which really just elevates it to the best friendship ever. It was easy to see why some people said having a “friends with benefits” arrangement was the best thing in the world if you were doing it with the right person.

And if weird feelings start to creep in, well, it’s easy enough to keep it all hidden and brush everything off as being bros who just happen to exchange mutually beneficial blow jobs because guys their age have certain needs.

Except.

 _“We’re just friends who suck each other’s dicks”_ isn’t an explanation for why Leon gets an actual fucking flutter in his stomach when Max smiles at him or pokes him in the side or climbs into bed with him to sleep.

 _“We’re just friends who suck each other’s dicks”_ isn’t an explanation for why Max wants to very literally punch Julian Brandt or shove him off when he gets too close to Leon.

 _“We’re just friends who suck each other’s dicks”_ isn’t an explanation for the way Max sometimes catches Leon looking at him with a little soft smile on his face when they weren’t even going to be in their hotel room for hours. It also isn't an explanation for how much Max likes it. 

 _“We’re just friends who suck each other’s dicks”_ isn’t an explanation for the soft way Max would brush the stray curl off Leon’s forehead and look at him with a gentle and fond smile as he does it. 

 _“We’re just friends who suck each other’s dicks”_ isn’t an explanation for the way Leon would often thread their fingers together when they’re kissing…..nor is it an explanation for why Max, someone who was never really a kisser and just did it as part of getting sex initiated, realised he could probably kiss Leon all day long without getting sick of it……….until he just had to get Leon off because the sounds he made when getting a blow job were the best sounds Max had ever heard in his life.

There is definitely an is an explanation for the way that sometimes, they are far, far more gentle than two people just hooking for the fun of it should ever be with each other.

And that explanation is not _“we’re just friends who suck each other’s dicks”._

-*-

Time flies when you start to get older and before they’ve even really wrapped their heads around it, Max and Leon have been in Brazil for eleven days.

They’re sitting together on the bus heading back to their hotel following the last training session before their first match. Max has the window seat because he told Leon he wanted the view, but he has his eyes closed and his head resting on Leon’s shoulder the whole time and has barely paid any attention to the sights out the window. Leon suspects Max isn’t actually asleep because he isn’t breathing the deep breathes he does when he is asleep for real. He'd had Max fall asleep wrapped around him enough times now to know when Max was asleep and when he was just pretending. 

But either way, it is one of those moments where Leon realises that life can be really fucking good.

Something just sort of clicks inside of him at that moment, like all the little random pieces of realisation that had started to present themselves over the past few days decided to click into place and give Leon the answer he was looking for.

“Max?”

“Hmmmm?” his friend replies, sitting up to look at Leon, confirming his suspicion that Max wasn’t really asleep.

“I’m……glad you’re here,” Leon tells him.

It’s a little out of nowhere, but Leon just had this overwhelming need to say it.

It is strange. The whole time he and Max had been friends, they’d always been direct and honest with each other.

(Well. Mostly_.

Other than both saying nothing about the fact that they'd wanted to hook up with each other for quite some time, if there was something they wanted to say, they said it.

And Leon just really wanted Max to know that he was glad they were doing the Olympics together and…….whatever it was this other thing between them could be called.

“Me too,” Max says, returning Leon’s comment with a smile before looking out the window at the view of the city passing by them.

“That’s not what I meant,” Leon says with a frown.

“I know, I was just trying to see where we were……I can’t tell though,” Max says with a slight frown, turning back around to face Leon.

“I’m glad I’m here and I’m glad you’re here too,” he says, frown giving way to a smile when his eyes meet Leon's. He shifts to press his body into Leon’s side without really caring about who might see them. It doesn’t really matter if someone were to notice them anyway, they’ve always been platonically affectionate with each other. If anyone on the team now correctly suspected that there might have been something else going on between them, they hadn’t said anything other than the standard teasing about them being “married” and “in love” that they’d been on the receiving end of ever since they first made the national team as teenagers.

“Max…..what are we exactly?” Leon says, asking the question that had been bugging him for about a week now.

Max frowns.

“Can we talk about this later?”

_Oh._

_Right then._

“We don’t have to talk about it at all, it’s fine. Fine. Totally fine. Don’t worry about it. Forget it,” Leon mumbles, looking down at his feet because he’s clearly an expert at ruining things and he really doesn’t want to look at Max when he’s left licking his wounds like a dumbass because he opened his mouth way too early and spooked him.

“Leon, no, you fucking idiot,” Max says, the words coming out a little louder than intended, but thankfully, no one turns around to look at them. Leon thanks the universe for whoever had the genius idea of inventing headphones, because they are the reason no one is paying any attention to them.

“What I meant is that……if you’re trying to ask me if I’ll like, be your boyfriend, there are better places to do it than on a weird smelling bus where I have to whisper and can’t kiss you when you’re done asking,” Max says with a little smile.

_Oh._

_Right then._

Leon sighs softly with relief before poking Max gently.

“Trying to be a romantic are we?”

Max blushes at little at that.

“No, I’m just saying……oh forget it, you asshole”.

“You make an adorable boyfriend you know? You’re a mushy little sap,” Leon teases.

Max shoves gently at him, muttering at Leon to shut the fuck up, but he’s smiling the way he does when he’s really, genuinely happy and Leon is glad that he’s known Max long enough to know what that smile means and that this has brought it out of him.

“So do you, dumbass,” Max says before putting his head back on Leon’s shoulder and closing his eyes because it’s all he can get away with doing in a bus full of their teammates and coaches.

They sit in comfortable silence for a minute or two before Max breaks the silence.

“I never thought I’d be the boyfriend type you know?” he says.

Leon doesn't know how to react to that because he doesn’t want Max to regret this or to feel weird about it. But Leon selfishly hoped he didn’t.

He liked Max beyond the physical attraction to him and wanted to be able to call him his boyfriend and be able to kiss him or ask him out to go eat whenever he wanted. And he cared about him far beyond a superficial level. He’d sit with Max while he cried and not think less of him, he’d do anything Max asked of him, and he wanted Max to be happy, maybe even more than he wanted himself to be happy.

“But I am with you,” Max continues before Leon can start to overthink.

“I don’t know, I mean, it sounds stupid, but I am with you even if it all happened quickly…..but in a way it didn’t? Not with how we were friends anyway. I don’t know, it’s just right with you?”

Leon smiles and kisses Max’s forehead, not giving a shit if someone were to see them.

“I know. You make me do stupid things too,” Leon says into Max’s hair.

 _‘Stupid things like maybe falling in love with you,’_ Leon’s brain supplies unhelpfully as Max snuggles even closer into Leon’s side.

Leon is so fucked.

“I’m not a stupid thing, you dumbass,” Max says with a laugh, poking Leon’s stomach gently.

“That’s open for debate,” Leon fires back at him with a wink.

Max raises his hand to flip Leon off and they ride in comfortable silence until Leon’s phone vibrates in his pocket a few minutes later. He pulls it out to see two new messages on his screen:

 **From Max Meyer (15:04):** im gonna kiss you properly when we get back to the hotel

 **From Max Meyer (15:04):** and that’s just the start of what im gonna do…….boyfriend ;-)

Leon is smiling as he taps out a reply:

 **From Leon Goretzka (15:05):**  No complaints from me……Boyfriend :-)

-*-

True to his word, Max kisses Leon properly the moment they are back in their hotel room, pushing him against the door and standing up on the tip of his toes to kiss him roughly and grind up on his hips with his own.

When Max pulls back from him to breathe, Leon grabs his wrist and walks them over to one of the beds. They kick their shoes off and tug at each other’s shirts to pull them off and throw them onto the floor as they go. Leon pushes Max down onto the bed and quickly sheds his sweatpants before climbing on top of Max.

This time, it’s Leon’s turn to kiss Max properly, which he does, until they’re both left panting desperately for breath. Leon doesn’t even give Max a chance to catch it before he starts kissing his way down his body, nipping harshly at the soft skin of his chest because he wants to leave a mark to claim Max as his own, but he’s not dumb enough to leave it on Max’s neck for everyone to see. Leon lifts Max’s hips up to slide off his sweatpants and boxers and stops for a moment to appreciate the sight beneath him.

“You always do this,” Max says impatiently, bucking his hips to try and get Leon to do something about his dick.

“Do what?” Leon asks innocently, even though he has a pretty good idea of what’s getting under Max’s skin.

“Stare at me when you should be sucking my dick,” Max says with an annoyed grumble, because he’s already painfully hard and Leon can surely fucking see that.

Leon grins at him before moving to straddle Max’s hips and lean down and kiss him, pulling back with a smirk only when he needs air.

“That’s because I really like the view from up here,” Leon says, sitting back up again and appreciating the sight beneath him. “You have no idea how hot you look when I get you like this,” he continues, tracing a finger over Max’s flushed cheek as the blonde’s bites into his lip, trying to suppress the whimper that threatens to escape his lips.

“Beautiful, you’re beautiful like this,” Leon whispers as Max bites into his lips, shifting down to start kissing his way back down Max’s body just to torture him. He skips past his dick to start pressing kisses into the inside of his thighs. Max brings his fingers to twist in Leon’s hair, trying to move him back upwards to where he needs Leon to put his mouth and Leon knows Max didn’t want for him to hear the ‘god, Leon, please….just…..please,” that escaped his lips, but he caught it anyway.

“You’re pretty when you beg,” Leon tells him, looking up at him with a smirk.

Max is about to tell him that he wasn’t fucking _begging_ thank you very much, but Leon finally takes mercy on him and takes the head of his dick into his mouth.

Max’s hips buck up so sharply that he catches Leon by surprise and Max gasps out an apology as Leon uses a hand to hold his hips down, the other wrapped around the base of Max’s dick, stroking slowly as he swirls his tongue around the head, slowly and then quickly as Max's breathing gets increasingly uneven before he's gasping out a warning as he clutches desperately at the white of the sheets. Leon ignores it, swallowing as Max comes down his throat and stroking fingers over his hip as he rides out the shudders of his orgasm.

Leon crawls back up Max’s body and it's a full couple of minutes before Max gains enough strength to flip Leon over.

“Your turn,” Max tells him, sliding down Leon’s body with a smirk.

As tempting as it is, Max doesn’t make Leon beg for it, because his need for Leon’s dick his mouth overrides his desire for revenge this time. Max takes Leon's already hard dick into his mouth and it doesn't take much more than a few strokes and swirls of his tongue and a flick of his wrist the way he already knows Leon likes it before Leon is coming down Max’s throat with a moan so loud Max really hopes the walls are soundproof.

Max climbs back up the bed and collapses next to Leon, burying himself in the crook of Leon’s arm with a content sigh.

“So this is real? A real thing? We’re really doing……it all?” Leon asks a few moments later.

“I thought I made that clear when I had you pinned up against the wall three seconds after we got in here,” Max says, trying not to roll his eyes because he pretty much discussed feelings on the bus, and that was a thing Max usually tried to avoid doing.

It scared him. He’d never had feelings before. He didn’t know how to talk about them.

Leon actually rolls his eyes in response.

“I don’t think your short ass could pin me up anywhere,” he says with an affectionate laugh.

“That’s no way to speak to your boyfriend, you jerk,” Max says, swatting at Leon lightly. He usually gets annoyed when people make jokes about his lack of height, but it never bothered him coming from Leon.

“It’s weird to hear you say that. Good weird. I never thought I’d hear you say that even if my mother kinda thought you were my boyfriend already”.

Max raises an eyebrow at Leon. “Wait…..what?”.

Oh shit.

Now Leon has to admit to what happened a few weeks ago and there’s a pretty good chance Leon is going to get teased about it forever.

But Max is looking at Leon expectedly for an explanation so what choice does he really have?

“Yeah so. Um. I guess I must have mentioned you a bit to her because she like, kept asking about you and then I just answered the questions because she was asking and I thought nothing of it I guess? But a few days before we left, she said I should bring you around when we get home because she’d like to meet my boyfriend,” Leon says sheepishly, glaring at Max when he laughs because it’s not fucking funny.

“I have no idea where it came from but I was too shocked to say anything and she was just like ‘good, it’s settled, he sounds like a nice boy’ and I just…I didn’t correct her because she walked away, and the moment was gone and I didn’t know how to bring it back up again,” Leon admits.

Max is still laughing, but it’s contagious because well, the whole situation is kinda funny and a testament to how much Leon did talk about Max and post about him on instagram when they were still just friends. He had made the crush he had on his best friend more than a little obvious.

Leon can't help himself, and he gives in to it and starts laughing along with Max.

“Well,” Max says pushing himself up on his elbow to lean above Leon’s face as he lies back against the pillow.

“Now you don’t have to correct her, because I am you boyfriend” Max says softly with a small smile.

Max never met anyone’s parents before, at least not in the context of being the boyfriend, but how bad could it be right?

“I hope she likes me though.” he says quietly, the words slipping out without Max really wanting them to.

“She’ll like you because I do and you make me happy,” Leon says gently but in a firm and matter of fact tone.

That’s good enough for Max who says “OK,” before settling himself back down in the crook of Leon’s arm looking sleepy and closing his eyes.

Leon raises his eyebrow.

“Max. It’s 4:30 in the afternoon”.

“I know, wake me up for dinner, I need a nap,” Max mumbles sleepily and Leon suspects it is a little put on given that Max was speaking just fine thirty seconds ago, but he doesn’t call him out on it. It was just another thing Max Meyer was getting away with because he was cute as hell when he wanted to be.

Leon just reaches over Max to the nightstand and plays on his phone for the next two hours while his newfound boyfriend sleeps using Leon as a personal teddy bear.

It’s not the worst thing Leon has experienced, even if he can feel Max drooling all over his upper arm the entire time.

-*- 

Any lingering doubts Max may have had about the depth of his feelings for Leon were shot to hell the moment he went down in their first game with the shoulder injury. He knew he'd have been upset if it happened a few months ago, no one likes to see their best friend get hurt, but now Max just wanted to run over there and thread his fingers through Leon’s and tell him it was going to be OK and make sure that pesky stray curl of his wasn’t getting in his face. But he couldn't, the whole damn world was watching them and all Max could do was pat Leon on the chest and hope Leon could understand messages delivered though his eyes, and then try and play the rest of the game without thinking about it.

It was harder than it should have been. And the bus ride back to the hotel was far lonelier than it should have been without Leon next to him.

Niklas comes up to him and sits himself down in the seat that should have been Leon’s.

“Are you OK,” he asks.

Max nods.

“I don’t believe you,” Niklas says.

Max doesn’t say anything because Niklas is right.

Max isn’t OK. Not only is he worried about Leon being injured because they are clubmates, but Max has been slapped with the true extent of his feelings for the person who up until about a couple of weeks ago, was simply his best friend.

“He’ll be ok, it didn’t look that bad,” Niklas says quietly.

Max looks up, still not daring to say anything.

“Is….there something else bothering you,” Niklas asks?

Even though he hasn’t said anything to suggest it, the mere thought that Niklas might be onto him is enough to spur Max into forcing himself to speak.

“No, I’m just worried about the injury, we need him back at the club you know, and well, no one wants to see a teammate get hurt right?” Max says, mentally patting himself on the back for how convincing he sounded.

“He’ll be fine, try not to worry,” Niklas says, patting Max on the leg before getting up.

"By the way, the hickey on your chest was obvious when you were showering, might want to tell Leon to be more careful next time you two are…..being loud," Niklas tells him with a wink.

The colour drains completely from Max's face as he looks up at Niklas who is smirking as he looks down at Max from the aisle, suddenly looking even taller than he already was. 

He was so far gone for Leon that people were working out what was going on, and while it may be true, he didn’t want it to be that obvious because they had their whole careers in front of them.

But he also couldn’t give the thought of giving up Leon a second’s thought. What his brain thought was irrelevant because his heart was all fucking in. There was no way he was letting go of Leon now, not when Leon made him so fucking _happy_ that it scared him a little. 

"It's alright you know?" Niklas says, and Max doesn't know how to react to that. He certainly doesn't need Niklas's permission to do anything with his life, and neither does Leon for that matter, but he's also glad he's not being weird about it or has a problem with it.

"If anything, I'd say it's about time you two finally got together and did something about the mutual pining you've had going on for years, although you could have done it at a tournament where I don’t have the room next to you both and get to hear you....literally doing something about it……" Niklas continues with a smug smirk.

Max is fucking speechless, and he can feel his cheeks starting to burn all the more furiously with every word Niklas says. He tries to form words but nothing comes out. 

"Look. He'll be alright, Max.....I'm sure you'll look after him….maybe just do it a bit quieter next time hey?" Niklas says with an eyebrow waggle.

Max rolls his eyes and throws his hat at Niklas, who is laughing as he retreats to sit back down next to Matze. 

_Fuck._

-*-

It’s past midnight when Leon finally walks into their room with his shoulder strapped up and the painkillers the doctor had given him starting to wear off. Leon tries to be quiet as he enters the room, but sees Max sitting on one of the beds in his boxers on his phone, still awake. He looks up when he hears Leon, his eyes full of concern.

It’s late, really late, and Max should be asleep but he didn’t bother trying because he knew there would be no way he’d be able to fall asleep without talking to Leon and knowing the extent of the injury.

He gets up off the bed and walks over to Leon, but hesitates at the sight of the sling. Leon pulls Max in with his good arm, holding Max tightly against his chest. Max wraps his arms around Leon, his hands grabbing fistfuls of Leon’s shirt against his back, mumbling something about ‘I was so fucking was worried,’ into Leon’s chest.

Leon rubs his hand up and down Max’s back.

He isn’t quite sure who is comforting who. But it’s OK. Because if he is truly honest with himself, Max’s concern for him is the first time that has dared let himself really believe that this thing between them isn’t as lopsided as Leon worries it is, and that maybe Max really does have strong feelings for him and didn’t agree to the boyfriends thing just because he liked the blowjobs.

“What did they say?” Max asks into Leon’s chest, the words to muffled for Leon to make out. Max loosens his grip on Leon’s shirt a little, looking up to ask him again.

“I’m out,” Leon says sadly.

Max doesn’t say anything. But Leon has known him for years and he knows the look Max gets on his face when he is truly crushed and disappointed. Max quickly tries to wipe it off his face, after all, he was not the one supposed to be upset and needing to be comforted. His boyfriend needed him and Max was the one who was meant to make it better and he was fucking sucking at it. Max knew he wasn’t necessarily great at the whole proper relationships thing, it wasn’t really a thing he did, but it was something he really did want this time.

It was _Leon_. Max would go to the ends of the earth for him, all he had to do was ask.

“You can still win this thing without me, you know that right?” Leon says reassuringly.

“I know,” Max says quietly, because he knows the team is good enough to do it. “It just won’t be the same without you,” he finished quietly.

Max wished he knew the right thing to say, the magical words that would make it all better and wipe the sadness out of Leon’s eyes. But both he and Leon knew there was no magic cure that would make this all better. Sometimes football was unfair, sometimes it just really really sucked, and there was nothing that could change that.

“How bad is it exactly,” Max asks.

“Bad enough they’re sending me home to rehab, but not bad enough to miss much of the season, if any,” Leon says.

Ok.

It could be worse. It could have been far worse. So there’s that, at least.

"I need to tell you something," Max says, and Leon looks at him with concern written all on his face. 

"Niklas knows," Max says quietly. "He said you should be a bit more careful when leaving marks on me and that we’re kinda….um, loud" Max says, trying not to laugh. He was embarrassed at the time they had the conversation, but after getting back to the hotel and having a better look at the mark Leon had left on his chest and remembering how loudly he’d cried out the night before, Max could see the amusing side of it. The mark _was_ big and Max _is_  a more than a bit of a screamer in bed. 

"Oh, is that all?" Leon says.

"You're not bothered?"

"I thought you were going to......break up with me or something, or tell me we were just Olympics boyfriends or something," Leon says. 

"No!' Max says quickly. "No way.....I was just worried you'd be bothered people knew," he says carefully, not wanting Leon to get the impression he is embarrassed of their relationship or ashamed people know abut them. Because it wasn't that. If he had his way and the world was a better place, he'd be letting everyone know Leon was his every chance he had.

"We never talked about if or when we were going to tell people, so you know....." Max trails off. 

"I'm not bothered by it if you're not," Leon says simply. 

"Ok. Good. Me either.......besides, we didn't really try to hide it did we?".

"Nah, not really," Leon says with a smile that doesn't looked forced despite the awful mood Max knows he must be in. He pulls Max against him for another hug with his good arm and kisses the top of his head, the way he always seems to do when giving Max a hug. Max should hate it, he's never liked it when people do things that remind him he's short, but he actually likes the kisses Leon plants in the blonde curls on top of his head. He wonders if Leon thinks about it, or just does it automatically. 

Leon should be tired, but he’s too bummed to sleep. Max instantly says they can watch a movie, claiming he’ll stay awake and keep him company.

Leon fixes him with a sceptical look. Ever since he'd gotten back to their room and all through their conversation, Max had been doing that thing with his face that Leon can recognise when he really wants to yawn but doesn’t want anyone to know he is tired and tries to hold it in. 

Leon agrees, but just as he expects, Max falls asleep about twelve minutes into the movie and he ends up finishing it on his own. When it’s finished, Leon carefully moves Max out from underneath his good shoulder to go over to the other bed where he can fall asleep with a bit less worry about hurting his shoulder more.

He wakes up the next morning to find Max sitting next to him in the bed he moved to, back resting against the headboard as he scrolls through his phone while it charges. He's never beaten Max awake before in the years they've known each other. 

"Hey," Leon says, frowning when he notices the weird look on Max's face. “You ok?”.

"Why are you over here?" Max asks quietly.

They hadn't slept in separate beds since they first kissed in Gelsenkirchen.

Max thought this whole boyfriends thing was something they were going to take home with them, not just some summer thing they were doing in Brazil that was over now they were sending Leon home.

The thought of their relationship being a thing Leon only wanted temporarily for some summer fun bothered Max far more than it should have. He should have been all over the idea of being friends with benefits, but when Leon asked him if they were more than that, Max surprised himself with how quickly he wanted to say yes and how much he liked the idea of it.

"I was scared of hurting my shoulder more," Leon says.

He wasn't entirely sure what Max was thinking, but he knew it couldn't be something pleasant, because Max was chewing his lip in the way he did when he was truly nervous about something.

“That’s all?” Max asks.

Leon can count on his fingers the times he’s heard Max sound insecure and this is one of them.

“That’s all, I promise” Leon says in confirmation, sitting up so his back was resting against the headboard, and turning to look at Max, hoping his eyes conveyed just how important it was that Max understood. 

"It's nothing to do with not wanting to be near you, I just didn't want to sleep on my side because the doctors told me not to, and there wasn’t enough room to sleep flat next to you,” he explains to Max, before leaning in to kiss him until he is satisfied he's felt he tension drain from Max's body.

"Ok," Max says.

"You didn't think this was just a messing around thing for the Olympics did you?" Leon asks and the look on Max's face gives him away.

"You're dumb," Leon tells him gently.

"I'll be waiting for you back in Germany ready to do so many stupid boyfriend things with you that you'll be begging me to stop........except for when I fuck you. You won't be begging for me to stop that, you'll just be pleading for me to go harder, I promise," Leon tells him with a wink and he might feel a little stupid talking dirty like that, it's worth it for way Max bites into his lip.

"I don't beg, Goretzka," Max says, his voice a little bothered, even if he’d deny it if Leon chose to call him out on it.

"Hmmmm, we must have different memories of the other night, I definitely remember some begging from these pretty lips of yours……." Leon tells him, tracing a finger over Max’s bottom lip.

"I really need a shower though and it might hurt to get undressed and soap up so, if you want to help me, I could make it worth your while," Leon offers, swatting lightly at Max to make him move.

Max wastes no time getting up off the bed and pulling Leon up with his good arm and dragging him into the bathroom.

It’s the first time that Max has been slow when undressing Leon, and it makes goosebumps form underneath Max’s fingers as they brush over his skin.

But what truly gets to Leon is the way Max looks at him.

It’s not the aggressiveness or desire that Max usually looks at Leon with once he’s got him stripped off, but something different. If Leon had to describe it, he’d say it was something between protectiveness and caring. The way Max would carefully sweep his fingers across Leon's exposed skin after stripping the layers of clothing away was something Leon could only describe as gentle. But what really got him was when Max had finally had Leon naked in front of him. Max wrapped his arms around Leon in a hug, pressing his lips against random patches of skin on Leon's chest before pulling back from him with a smile. Max quickly shed his own clothes before running the water and pulling Leon in gently with him. 

Max gently skipped the loofah, preferring to use his hands to softly soap up Leon's skin. 

As much as Leon liked Max looking a him with a fire in his eyes, like he'd literally been waiting all day to have Leon's dick in his mouth and was finally about to get what he wanted, he liked it just as much, maybe even more, when Max looked at him with softness in his eyes, like Leon was this precious thing he couldn't quite believe he was allowed to call his own.

-*-

When Max was little, he hated having bandaids pulled off.

He'd try to slowly ease them off gently, but it still stung no matter how gentle it tried to be. But one day, his father saw him doing it and came over to him and took the bandaid and ripped it off suddenly. It hurt like hell, but it was also over much quicker than the way Max would try and do it. His father then explained to him that sometimes, it hurts less to just rip the pain in one swift go instead of dragging it out for longer in little bits and pieces.

"So. Um. They made me captain," Max says quietly, looking at the floor.

He decided to use the bandaid theory in telling Leon the news he found out after training, a session that Leon missed to have his shoulder looked at again by the medical staff.

It was the elephant in the hotel room that Max really didn't want to bring up, but he also didn't want Leon to learn the news from the internet or from one of their other teammates. That didn't really feel fair and Max felt like he owed it to Leon to tell him the news himself. But that didn’t mean it was easy, and he kept his eyes fixed to the charcoal carpet so he didn’t have to see whatever combination of sadness, jealousy and resentment flickered over his face.

"Max," Leon says gently.

Max doesn't budge and continues to look at the floor.

“Max,” Leon says again, this time more insistent, but still gentle.

Leon sighs when Max still continues to look at the floor like it's telling him all the secrets to being a better player than Messi and Ronaldo combined.

“Max. Look at me……..Please?”

It’s the ‘ _please’_ that gets to Max. He doesn’t think he’ll ever learn to say no to Leon when he says please.

He sighs in resignation, hesitantly looking up and opening his eyes to look at Leon.

“Congratulations,” Leon says. It’s warm and sincere and somehow, that makes Max feel even worse than if Leon was upset or bothered by it.

He doesn’t say anything in response, because what can he say? Max had basically taken special something from Leon all for himself. That armband was never supposed to be on Max’s arm, it belonged to Leon, and they both knew it.

“Max, they were always going to make someone else captain since I can't play the rest of the tournament,” Leon explains to him gently. “And since they had to, I wanted it to be you….....I'm glad it's you” he continues.

Max wonders what he did to deserve Leon.

“I’ll win the whole thing for you, I promise,” Max says impulsively, because dammit, he will. He'll do anything to make this shitty situation better for Leon. 

“I’ll be proud of you no matter what though, you know that right?” Leon says and even if it is a big word to use, he needs Max to know it. Leon doesn’t want him making promises he may not be able to keep, and to feel like he’ll have let Leon down if the team doesn’t win. It’s not that he doesn’t believe in Max, because Leon does, he believes in the whole team. But Max can’t single handedly control an entire football game, Brazil had bought Barcelona superstars with them, and it’s football, anything can happen.

“I……”

Max doesn’t know what to say.

“You’re going to be a great captain, okay?” Leon says softly.

Max nods. He wasn't much of an emotional or mushy kind of person as a rule, but he wasn’t prepared for the flood of feelings that Leon was giving him right now. Leon pulls Max into him with his good arm, holding him against his chest.

"Can I write something dirty on the inside of the armband for you?" Leon asks into Max’s hair, his fingers stroking Max’s left arm on the spot where he’d be wearing the armband.

Max looks up at Leon and rolls his eyes, causing them to both burst out laughing.

"You're such an idiot, I don't know why they even though you were mature enough to be a captain in the first place," Max tells him, shaking his head.

“So that’s a yes then?” Leon asks.

“It’s a _‘I’m not letting you anywhere near my armband’, Goretzka'_ ,” Max tells him, knowing perfectly well that Leon will just take it to snapchat before the game, because he can be a fucking teasing asshole sometimes. 

-*-

Leon isn’t scheduled to leave until the day after their second game, meaning he’s still around to see Max play his first game as captain.

Max is nervous.

He almost never gets nervous before a game, but he is this time.

It’s the Olympics, he’s the captain and the pressure is getting to him in a way it never usually does before a big game.

Leon walks out through the tunnel on the way to the bench when he sees Max leaning against the wall looking positively terrified. He pushes past someone, not caring or bothering to see who it was, and makes his way over to Max and kisses him on the forehead.

“You got this,” he tells Max, pausing for a second to make sure his boyfriend has got the message before walking away. He doesn’t want to, but there’s only so long he can linger around before it looks weird.

Max watches Leon walk away.

"You got this," Max repeats to himself.

Because he does. He wasn't going to lose the gold medal when he had to win it for Leon.

-*-

 

Max returns from training the next day to find Leon in their hotel room trying to fold a plaid shirt with just one arm. He lets himself watch for a few seconds because there is something cute about the way Leon has it tucked under his chin and can't quite work out how to get it folded neatly, but he doesn’t plan to actually make Leon suffer.

“I’ve got it,” Max says, walking over to him and talking the shirt from his hand, even though he doesn’t actually know how to fold a shirt properly. He tends to just throw things into his suitcase and then pay for ironing because he hates both ironing and packing.

Leon sits down on one of the beds, the one they hadn’t slept in the night before and watches wordlessly as Max starts packing his things into his suitcase for him. Packing might be an overly nice way to put describe the way that Max is folding things weirdly and shoving them in the suitcase, but Leon appreciates the help (and it’s better than he’d manage right nowwith one arm) so he chooses not to make a comment about how everything will need to be re-ironed once he gets back to Gelsenkirchen.

But even though it is nice of Max to volunteer his help, however inept he may be at packing, it was still bugging Leon to sit there and watch his boyfriend do something so simple for him.

Leon hates feeling useless, especially in front of Max.He was still wanting to impress him, yet here he was, sitting on a bed in a sling and unable to do something as simple as folding a shirt.

As if he’s developed mind reading capabilities, Max looks up him with a small smile.

“I can hear you over thinking this, stop it, you’re injured, not weak. I don’t think any less of you, and you’d do it for me if it was the other way around without making fun of me,” Max says and Leon raises his hands in a mock surrender with a smile but…. _damn_.

Max completely had a read on him in this situation and Leon wasn't sure how he felt about that. They’d been best friends for over three years, but Leon was still a little surprised at the depth of understanding Max had about his feelings.

And he was completely right too. Leon would have done it for Max and not thought any less of him for needing his help. If anything, Leon might have slightly enjoyed it. Not having Max injured, but the idea of Max needing him. Leon could enjoy that.

“But you hate packing,” Leon says, picking a safe response.

Max shrugs. "It’s not that bad,” he says and they both know it is a blatant lie.

Leon has shared a room with Max countless times before and he always whines about packing and there has been more than one occasion where Leon ended up throwing his things into his suitcase for him just to shut him up.

Leon continues to watch as Max finishes putting Leon’s clothes into the suitcase. He notices one of his shirts still on the bed, near the pillow and he automatically points it out to Max without really thinking.

The blush that forms on Max’s cheeks is instantaneous.

_Oh._

Max was clearly forgetting to pack the shirt on purpose.

‘Oh….I mean, don’t worry about it, I don’t really need it,’ Leon says quickly, wishing he didn’t open his stupid mouth because Max looks ready to fucking die and is clearly more than a little embarrassed Leon caught him out. As much as Max wanted to deny it because he was not a sap thank you very much, he also knew there was no point. His face had already given him away.

It was obvious Leon knew what exactly Max was trying to do.

“I thought if I kept it, it would be like keeping a piece of you here, ugh, forget it, it’s stupid, I’m fucking stupid,” Max says uncomfortably, cheeks flushing redder than they’d ever been in his life as he picks up the shirt and starts to put it in Leon's suitcase.

Leon shifts up the bed quickly and reaches out to catch Max’s wrist with his good arm. He pulls Max towards him and down to sit on his lap. They’re sitting at a weird angle, but it doesn’t manner, especially not when Max still has that adorable pink flush in his cheeks.

And it doesn’t matter to Max either, not when he decides to risk it and look at Leon and sees Leon looking back at him like.........well, he doesn’t know how to describe it but Leon is looking at him almost like Max is the most precious thing in the world. His eyes are so soft that it makes Max think that maybe Leon is actually kinda gone for him.

And that's a thought that doesn't scare him nearly as much as it should. If anything, it’s a thought Max likes. The thought of Leon being far enough gone for him to look at him like he hung the moon is enough to give him this weird feeling in his stomach. A welcome, warm feeling in his stomach.

Leon doesn’t really know what he can say without being stupid and corny. They’d barely had a label on this whole thing for a week, and he didn’t want to say anything too soon and ruin it, not when he finally had the thing he’d wanted for the last two and a half years sitting on his lap and trying to keep his clothes for himself.

So he settles for the safe option and states the obvious.

“Keep it,” he says to Max with a smile. “But it’s going to be way too big for you, you shortass, you know that right?”.

“I was going to sleep with it, not wear it,” Max says. Leon didn’t think it was possible, but Max’s cheeks turn even pinker.

Leon figured and knew as much, but he likes that he tricked Max into admitting to it. He sighs a little to himself because how can he not like the thought of Max curled up in bed, and holding Leon’s stupid plaid shirt against his body as he does. But he wasn’t going to say it, not now, not with a bung shoulder and little sleep and a plane leaving for Germany in a few hours time and a little fear that everything was just happening a little too quickly, and too much too soon would scare Max away.

So he kisses him instead, because he can't go wrong with that, and Max kisses him back before climbing up off his lap.

“I should make sure all your stuff is ready,” he says.

Leon must look a little hurt or maybe worried, because Max quickly leans back down to kiss him.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says, eyes flicking over to the sling on Leon’s shoulder.

“I’ll tell you if you do,” Leon says truthfully and Max sits back onto his lap, carefully steadying himself so Leon doesn’t have to do anything to hold him there. Max kisses him again, fingers tangled through Leon's hair as he tries to make the most of the last moments they get to be together before he has to leave and go back to the other side of the world.

“Ok, but really, I need you to sit on the suitcase so I can get it to shut,” Max says when he pulls back from Leon, his face still so close that Leon can feel the warm breath on his face as Max speaks. Leon laughs, cocking his head to tell Max to climb off him so he can oblige and help him out.

Of course Max would have packed it in a way that needs someone to sit on the bag in order to close it.

Max asks Leon if there is anything else than needs to go into the suitcase.

Leon thinks for a moment and bends down to pick up one of Max’s shirts from the floor. It's one of his many stupid grey ones with a dumb print on the front, some model he doesn't recognise. He thinks he's even made fun of Max for it at some point. But it smells of Max's cologne, and if Max was going to sleep with one of his shirts, Leon wanted one of Max's to sleep with as well. Fair's fair, after all. 

“Here, put this in, it might help me sleep better in Gelsenkirchen,” Leon says, holding the shirt out to Max. 

Max’s face threatens to burst from the smile that breaks onto his face and the relief that Leon didn't think he was stupid and even wanted to take one of his shirts back home, a shirt that Max knew Leon actually hated. 

Max takes the shirt from Leon and puts in the suitcase, before swatting gently at his ass, ordering him to sit on the suitcase so he can zip it up.

Leon turns to him with a raised eyebrow.

“Didn’t know you were into that,” Leon says with a smirk.

“There’s a lot you’ll find out when your shoulder is better and you can finally actually fuck me,” Max says with smirk of his own, the embarrassment of being caught keeping Leon's shirt all but gone and replaced with the thought of finally getting to have more than blow jobs.

“Now sit on the damn suitcase you idiot,” he demands.

Leon obliges, sits down on the bag while Max zips it shut around him before standing up and offering his hand for Leon to take.

Leon is pulled up from the suitcase and bounces on his feet a little before he is left standing right in front of Max, who brings his arms to rest around Leon’s waist.

“So. Do you need anything else?” Max asks, because there is time for a last blow job before Leon leaves and it’s not like Leon would be able to have much relief at home with his dominant hand attached to his bad shoulder.

“Wait with me?” Leon asks.

Max laughs because, well, that goes without saying, he wasn’t exactly going anywhere for the last few minutes he got to have Leon in Brazil with him.

“I can do that but…….any other last requests?” Max says, slipping his fingers underneath the waistband of Leon’s sweatpants, looking up at him and smirking as he catches the moment his boyfriend gets exactly what Max is suggesting.

“They’re coming to pick me up soon,”

“We’ve got like, ten minutes and the door is locked” Max says, grabbing Leon by the hand and walking them over to the wall and putting Leon's back against it gently as to not slam his shoulder into it.

“Stop me if I’m hurting your shoulder at all, yeah?” Max waits for Leon to nod before he drops down to his knees, reaching up to pull Leon’s sweatpants and boxers down, licking his lips when Leon’s dick springs free, already half hard just from Max’s light suggestion of what was about to come.

Max spits into his hand and grips around the base of Leon’s dick, bringing it to his mouth to wrap his lips around the head, quickly getting Leon's dick completely hard.

Leon tangles his fingers in Max’s hair and Max whimpers around his dick when Leon tugs on the blonde strands enough to elicit a flash of light pain. Leon instantly stops, taking his hands out of Max's hair.

Max pulls off Leon’s dick.

“Why did you stop?”

“It was hurting you,”

“Doesn’t mean I didn’t like it,” Max says with a bemused smirk and a wink, taking Leon back into his mouth and OK, Leon can work with that.

He threads the fingers of his good hand back into Max’s hair, curly from where he hadn’t bothered styling it and making a mental note to pull hard on Max's hair when he finally gets to fuck him properly back in Germany.

Leon wasn’t going to last much longer, not if Max kept tracing his tongue the way he was.

“Max I’m gonna,” he gets out a couple of times, which just makes Max stroke the bottom of his dick harder and when Max flicks his tounge justlikethat, Leon’s fingers clench tightly in Max’s hair as he comes down his boyfriend’s throat. Max swallows almost all of it, a little hanging at the corner of his mouth.

There is a knock at the door and Max bursts out laughing.

Leon sheepishly goes to pulls his pants and boxers up but it’s not that easy one handed and Max quickly wipes the come from the corner of his lip and starts laughing harder at Leon’s struggle with his pants, while the knock at the door gets more impatient with them already.

“Yeah yeah, one moment,” Max yells out through his laughter as quickly he pulls Leon’s boxers and pants back up for him. 

“You’re hopeless,” he says in a teasing voice, leaning up on his tip-toes to press his lips to Leon’s for a second before going and answering the door, letting the driver and a couple of the team staff into the room. 

Max insists on carrying Leon’s duffel bag down to the car for him even when the driver says he can take it for him, saying something about wanting to see him off. If anyone thinks it is a little weird, they thankfully don't say anything about it and just let Max do it.

The ride down to the lobby is in painful silence, as are the moments when the team staff wish Leon well as they his belongings into the trunk.

Right before Leon is about to get into the car, he taps Max’s shoulder to get his attention.

“Good Luck”

Leon hates that he can’t kiss him before he leaves, but the little wink that Max gives him in response tells him he understands.

Leon winks back at him before getting into the car. He felt shit enough about the injury and having to leave Brazil early but having to leave while Max was here and about to play without him hurt. And it felt somehow like they had unfinished business, like there was more that was supposed to happen between them before they went home and now it would be all left hanging in the air until Max arrived back in Germany, hopefully not straight away because he wanted the team to win the Gold medal, even if he couldn't be a part of it.

Max watched as the car taking Leon to the airport drives away and turns the corner onto the street.

He expected to feel a bit bummed out when Leon left, because well, he’d miss the blow jobs and having someone to curl around when sleeping, and the thing Leon did with his hand when jerking Max off that left him a pathetic mess.

But he didn’t expect it to feel so bad and he definitely wasn’t feeling this way just because he was going to miss the sex.

He was going to miss Leon.

He was going to miss Leon smiling at him when he walked into the room, and Leon’s fingers in his hair when Max sat on his bed on his phone, and the eyerolls Leon would sneak him when Julian or Niklas were being annoying, and a whole bunch of other things that didn’t involve Leon's dick or his mouth.

Hell, Max really liked the way Leon looked at him like he personally hung all the stars in the sky when Max was sitting in his lap twenty-five minutes earlier.

Maybe this was what it meant to really like someone.

He’d had a couple of girlfriends and a boyfriend in the past, but he’d never felt like this before about any of them.

Max shook his head, as if the motion could somehow physically knock the uncomfortable thoughts of his head and keep them out for good.

This wasn’t what Max did.

He didn’t do these kind of feelings and he certainly didn’t do them this quickly. He did hook ups in nightclubs and sometimes fucking a friend because Max liked attractive people and adored being fucked and it was mutually beneficial for both parties.

Max's uncomfortable realisation was confirmed when Max went back upstairs into the hotel room formerly known as "His and Leon's Room" and sat down on one of the beds.

With no Leon around, it felt completely empty and even though Max had a whole team out in the corridor of people he called his friends, he suddenly felt incredible lonely, like he was suddenly all alone out here.

Max could have easily pulled out his phone and got on tinder and found some people to hook up with.

It was the fucking Olympics, it couldn’t be that hard to find some hot guy or girl to sleep with, and Leon was going back to Germany and he’d never have to know or find out about it.

But Max didn’t want to.

He just wanted Leon back.

He was getting way more than he ever bargained for that night he hooked up with Leon.

He was supposed to scratch an itch by banging the best friend he was strangely attracted to and maybe make a mutually beneficial friend with benefits arrangement with him.

That was it.

He wasn’t supposed to fall in love with him.

Fuck.

That's what it was. At least he thinks so. His feelings were ticking every single box that people who had been in love had described to him.

Max was so god damn fucked.

-*-

Two draws had made things in the team camp more tense then they had expected, but then they thrash Fiji 10-0 and Max scores a hat-trick and he’s back to believing that they really can win this thing. Leon texts Max straight after the game, but it’s not until Max is back on the bus and reunited with his phone that he sees what Leon has written.

He’s spent the last two days with the uncomfortable realisation that had presented itself about five minutes after Leon left for Germany, so Max isn’t even surprised when he feels a little jump in his stomach when he sees Leon has texted him.

 **From Leon Goretzka (20:01):** I’m so fucking proud of you.

 **From Leon Goretzka (20:01):** Also, I told you so.

 **From Leon Goretzka (20:01):** #yougotthis

Max smiles ridiculously when he reads the messages, relieved that no one was sitting next to him.

 **From Max Meyer (21:45):** tell me yr still awake plz?

Max gets a reply less than a minute later.

 **From Leon Goretzka (21:46):** I am why?

Max smiles to himself because they’ll be back at the hotel in less than fifteen minutes and he has an idea.

 **From Max Meyer (21:47):**  wanna facetime u, gotta tell u something, 20 mins k?

 **From Leon Goretzka (21:47):** OK :-)

-*-

“So let me tell you about this dream I had last night,” Max says the moment Facetime connects him to Leon.

“Hello to you too,” Leon says with a laugh, propping up his iPad and settling back against his pillows.

“Go on, let me hear it then,” he says when he’s satisfied the iPad will stay up on its own.

Max smiles at Leon, the mischievous smirk he says that Leon knows spells trouble and/or torture for his dick.

Max moves back from his own screen so Leon can see more of him and it’s only then that Leon sees that Max is lying on his bed dressed in just a pair of training shorts, tented already from where his dick was already half hard.

Fuck distance.

Leon would have fucking killed to be in Brazil where he could climb on top of Max to congratulate him properly for his performance again, maybe with the armband on and nothing else while Leon fucked him.

“So…..I was finally back at my place in Gelsenkirchen after the Olympics and I tried to call you when I was like, 15 minutes from home because it had been so fucking long and I wanted to finally feel you fuck me, but you weren’t answering your phone. I called you like four times right? But you didn’t answer, so I gave up and went home. There was a note attached to the door that told me to go upstairs into my bathroom, so I did, hoping I wasn’t being lured to my death…….there you were, sitting on the basin with just a towel over your hips.”

Leon shifts a little uncomfortably and it doesn’t go unnoticed by Max, who sniggers at him.

“I’m just getting started Leon.”

“I know, that’s why I was getting myself more comfortable,” Leon says, glad the unseasonably hot weather in Gelsenkirchen that day meant his shirt was already off before going to bed because Max would have really laughed at him if Leon had taken it off now.

“Anyway…..I have no idea how you even got into my house, so I asked you and you just winked me and said I must feel really gross from being on the plane and could do with a shower. And you got up from the basin and the towel fell and left you completely naked. You fucking innocently said you were going to have one and I should join you……..it might have been just a dream but I’d never gotten undressed and into the shower faster”

Leon’s already breathing heavily and his words are little laboured when he asks Max what he did next.

Max opens his eyes to look at Leon through the screen of his own iPad.

“You pushed me up against the wall under the water, you had me pinned to it Leon, because you’re so much bigger than me, I couldn’t have moved, even if I wanted to” Max continues.

“And then……” Max’s breath hitches and Leon looks over to see him shoving his shorts down around his thighs, sighing in contentment when his hand wraps around his dick.

“Leon……you got down on your knees in front of me. And you started at my knee and you were kissing your way up to my dick but you were being so fucking slow and you were fucking killing me so I tried to pull your head up a bit using your hair, but you reached up and slapped my hand away you fucker”.

Leon is so far fucking gone because Max’s voice is doing things to him and there’s pretty much nothing he wouldn’t give to have Max’s wet thighs under his lips right now. He forgets trying to play it cool and lifts up his hips to drag his shorts down before spitting into his hand and reaching down to start slowly stroking his dick. He at looks the screen to see Max jerking himself off slowly as he speaks. He notices Leon staring at him and he licks his lips and winks at him.

“You finally started sucking me off…..ugh, it was so good Leon, my hand doesn’t even fucking come close to how your lips get me off you know. I miss you….so fucking much…I….I keep thinking of you every time I do this but it’s not the same….I need the real thing….I need you”.

Leon’s close and he knows Max is close too from the way his eyes are squeezed shut and his breathing is completely uneven.

“Look at me,” Leon says to the screen.

Max turns to look at him, teeth sinking into his bottom lip.

“Just…..my name. Max. Just……keep saying it, please” his voice is rough and he feels his cheeks heating up as he begs Max to do it, but he doesn’t care, he needs it, and Max gives him what he needs.

“Leon……Leon…..come for me babe, you don’t fucking know what you fucking do to me, do you, Leon?” and the way Max’s breath catches on as he says his name the last time is what does it, and Leon comes into his hand with a groan.

“Dammit Leon you sound so fucking hot when you come, you are so fucking hot….you get me so..…you…Leon god,” Max gasps and Leon opens his eyes in time to see Max fall apart into his hand with Leon’s names on his lips.

They’re slumped on their respective beds thousands of miles apart, looking at each other with small, content smiles on their faces. It’s at least a minute before either of them work up the energy to move or to say anything.

“If we make the final…….eleven days and I’ll be home,” Max says, rolling over onto his side and pulling the iPad closer to him.

“I’m not even ashamed to admit I’ve been counting them down, you know?”.

Leon smiles at that because sometimes he’s scared that he is way more into this thing than Max is. But when he hears Max say things like that and when he thinks of the way Max looked _broken_ when Leon told him he had to go back to Germany early, he lets himself think that maybe, just maybe, Max might just be even half as gone as Leon is. And Leon knows that he is so fucking far gone for Max that it scares him a little.

“Max?”

“Hmmmmm?” he responds, still sated and a little boneless.

“Did you really have that dream?” Leon asks him.

Max laughs and even from thousands of miles away and through a screen, it’s one of the most beautiful sounds in the world to Leon’s ears.

“Nah, I just wanted to get us off to be honest……I kinda thought about what I wanted you to do to me when I was on the bus and we got back and……yeah” Max says and Leon feels stupid things at the sight of that smile on the screen.

“But for future reference……you’re more than welcome to show up naked in my bathroom to suck my dick. Seriously, any time, I’ll get you a key,” Max tells Leon.

"A key?" Leon asks cautiously. It sounds like a big deal, but is it really? He doesn't know.

"I miss you," Max blurts out, it sounds a little like Max didn't mean to say it, but he also doesn't make any move to take it back.

"I miss you too," Leon says. And it feels like he says it automatically, but he means it. Now that he is used to having Max wake up next to him, he hates the feeling of not waking up next to him.

“But I can get you a key OK?” Max says with a small, earnest smile.

“Ok. I’ll get you a key as well,” Leon says, returning the smile, making a note to go out and get it cut tomorrow. It's not like he'd have to explain anything to his parents who thought he was dating Max before he actually was. And if Max was talking about showing up to each other's places for surprise sex, then well, that's something that Leon was more than down with.

-*-

And that becomes the first of several times Max facetimes Leon with the intent of getting them both off. It makes sense to Leon. Max would have jerked off whether or not he and Leon had this boyfriends thing going, so why not give Leon the pleasure of getting to watch Max’s tattooed arm slide up and down as his hand works his cock, and his teeth sinking into his lip as he thumbs over the head mumbling Leon’s name as if it was his boyfriend’s hand getting him off. If Leon wasn’t already hard by that point, he would be just by realising that when Max did that with his eyes closed, it was because he was imagining Leon’s hand wrapped around his dick. Leon would have given just about anything to be in Brazil with his hands or lips around Max’s dick.

But the calls are not the only thing Max does.

And considering Leon had this little feeling in the bottom of his gut that the boyfriends thing was really just based on sex, it was weird.

Max texts him through the day and continues to send him the same stupid private snapchat videos he would before this all begun. Not a lot changes really, it’s still the friendship they had for years before the day Max kissed Leon, except they now have the kisses and orgasms and facetime sessions and the spooning thrown in between it. Leon couldn’t even get over how much he loved falling asleep with Max’s back pressed firmly against his chest and his leg tangled in between his.

And they now have the stupid blue heart emojis they’ve taken to saying good night to each other with.

It’s the most confusing thing of all for Leon the first time Max does it.

It’s just a stupid emoji, sent as an individual message after Max says good night.

But that one little blue heart can mean absolutely nothing or it could mean absolutely everything.

Leon didn’t dare ask Max what he means by it.

But he sends one back when replying, and from there, it becomes a thing.

A thing that Leon doesn’t even understand.

-*-

“I’m so nervous that I can’t sleep,” Max says so quietly that Leon almost doesn’t hear him.

Max had forgotten about the three hour time difference between them, and had Facetimed Leon at 3:48am Gelsenkirchen time the night before the Olympic final.

Leon would have never snapped at Max anyway, but if he had of been considering it, the thought would have gone straight out the window at the sound of how vulnerable Max sounded.

It made Leon wish he was back in Brazil so he could lie down next to him and pull Max against his chest and lull him to sleep with soothing circles on his skin and promises that it would be OK and that no matter what happened todaytomorrowwhateverwerecallingit, Max was awesome and Leon loves him anyway.

Maybe it was a good thing that Leon wasn’t there. Because he didn’t trust himself not to blurt out the words too soon if he had Max’s skin against his lips, and the only thing stopping him from doing something stupid was not having his boyfriend next to it.

It scared him a little, how quickly it was clear his feelings for Max were love.

“Leon?” Max says quietly.

“Oh, sorry,” Leon replies.

“I thought I’d lost you,” Max says and while Leon knows he is talking about the phone connection, he goes with the deep answer anyway.

“That would never happen,” Leon says and he smiles at the sight of Max cracking a small smile through the iPad screen.

“Don’t be nervous,” Leon tells him. He knows it is easier said than done, he knows that Max will feel nervous until the moment he steps out onto the pitch where it will melt away as soon as he feels the pitch and ball underneath his feet.

But he’s known Max well for years and he knows that Max needs reassurance right now.

And it says something that he called Leon.

He’d heard Max make these sort of phone calls before to his mother when he thought Leon was asleep and wouldn’t hear him if he went into he bathroom and called home. Leon never mentioned them to Max, not wanting to make his friend feel embarrassed about making them if it was what he needed. 

But he didn’t call his mother this time.

He’d called Leon.

He thought Leon would make him feel better and would give him the comfort he needed and that makes his heart fucking swell.

Max doesn’t say anything.

“Babe listen to me…..,” Leon says, the endearment rolling off his tongue before he could catch it, but Max is his boyfriend so it’s surely ok.

“You’re going to be fine. I believe in you,”

“But what if we don’t win and I fail as captain and I let you down, because I can’t bear the though of letting you down, I don't wanna fail you....”

“No,” Leon says, softly but firmly cutting Max off.

“Don’t even think about that,” Leon tells him. He’s touched that Max is looking at it this way and wants to win it for Leon so badly, but he doesn’t want to be a source of pressure. And it’s entirely unnecessary. Gold or Silver, it doesn’t matter, and won’t change Leon’s feelings for Max.

“No mater what happens, it doesn’t matter and you know why?” Leon says.

“Because you’re going to be home in less than three days and all that matters is that I’ll get to see you,” Leon says with a smile and he sees Max crack a smile over the screen.

Max smiles softly again and Leon prays that he gets it. Prays that Max understands that Leon cares about him and doesn’t even care about the medal either way because all he wants is to finally have Max in his arms and be able to kiss him until he can’t breath and drag him to bed and finally have him underneath him as Leon is finally inside him. He hopes that Max understands that Leon truly cares about him and not just his dick. Sure, Leon likes Max’s dick. He really really likes Max’s dick. But he also really really likes _Max_.

“And gold or silver or scoring five goals or getting sent off in the second minute, I’m going to be all over you when I finally get to see you, so I hope you get some sleep on the plane,” Leon says.

He sees Max visibly relax as he exhales a slightly dreamy sigh.

“Oh I like the sound of that,” Max says.

“We can do whatever you want,” Leon says casually. “I can put you in the shower since long haul is gross and clean you up and suck you off……or we can go to bed and I can fuck you, slow, hard, whatever you want babe, you tell me what you want and I’ll make it happen for you,” Leon tells him.

A small moan escapes Max’s lips and Leon smirks to himself, pleased at himself for both getting Max’s mind off the nerves and for being able to get him interested with just a couple of sentences.

“Yeah?”

“Mmmmm?” Leon says.

“I think I want you to finally fuck me,” Max says.

“Your mouth is….god, I can’t even Leon, but I need you to finally fuck me,” Max says.

“We can do that,” Leon says. “How do you want me to do it,” Leon says, and Max takes the hint and smiles as he lifts his hips off the bed to shirk off his sweatpants to pool around his ankles. He spits into his hand and wraps it around the base of his dick, and Leon shifts slightly, trying to keep himself level headed because his is about Max not him.

“That’s it, go on, tell me how you want me, because I’m all yours when you get back here,” Leon says in encouragement.

“I want to lie on my back,” Max says, eyes fluttering closed as he strokes himself.

“I want to see your face, watch you bite your lip as you fuck me,” Max continues. “Reach up to run a hand down your chest, feel muscles under my hand, and god, I know it will feel good because you're so fucking big” he says and Leon can’t fully bite back the moan of his own.

“Like, you’re the biggest guy I’ve ever been with…..feels incredible in my mouth, know it’s going to feel amazing in my ass too……and you have the prettiest dick I’ve ever sucked too, I fucking love your dick,” Max says and Leon knows he’s too old to worry about dick size, but yeah, hearing Max praise him like that feels damn good, he’s not going to lie.

“You’d close your eyes as you fuck me, but when I’m about to come, I’d tell you to open them when I came so I could see you, I’ll want to see you looking at me when I come” Max says “….and you’d look right at me too, you’d make sure you get me off first, maybe help a little and I’d come harder than I ever have before and you’d kiss me and then let yourself get off and I’d tell you how much I..….”

Max chokes back a muffled cry as he suddenly comes into his hand without warning, the flick of his wrist doing it for him.

He lies back against his pillows for a few seconds, looking relaxed at last.

Leon wants to ask Max what he’d tell him, but Max speaks first.

“You didn’t….,” Max says, looking guilty. He’s sometimes worried that he takes too much from Leon and isn’t always the best at giving back. He’s not the one who is missing out on the whole tournament because he got injured, yet Leon is the one promising him special things when they are reunited when it should be the other way around.

“You needed it, it’s fine. Go to sleep. I’ll wait until you do,” Leon says softly. 

Max sounds tired and he needs his sleep and he could probably fall asleep. He looks like he’s about to argue through the screen when Leon shakes his head.

“What I need is for you to win and you’ll only win if you go to sleep,” Leon says gently.

“I guess,” Max says with a yawn and Leon chuckles.

“Sleep. I’ll wait until you do,” he says quietly.

Max doesn’t seem to need too much time to think it over as he agrees, grabbing a few tissues from the nightstand to wipe off the mess on his stomach and discarding them in the wastebasket before snuggling under his quilt willingly.

“I’ll say it again tomorrow, but good luck tomorrow,” Leon says.

“Thank you,” Max says, and he falls asleep after just a few minutes.

True to his word, Leon only disconnects the call when Max’s breathing is at a steady and deep rhythm. He goes into the bathroom to make quick work of his own half hardness before climbing back into bed and trying to go back to sleep himself.

But it’s not easy to fall asleep because Leon’s brain keeps going over what Max was about to say before he came.

Leon tries not to wonder if Max would tell him how much he loves him.

Because he’d really like it if he did.

-*-

Leon’s mother came over to watch the Olympic final with him, suggesting that he might need some moral support. While he really wasn’t feeling as upset or bitter as some might have thought, he was feeling incredibly nervous. Plus his mother had promised to bring some homemade cookies with her, and Leon was never one to turn down some of his mother’s amazing baked goods.

The moment Leon watches Max score in the Olympic final is one of the proudest moments of his life, and he never knew it was possible to feel so proud of someone else. And Leon found himself feeling pretty relieved that his mother already knew about him and Max (albeit earlier than it really was a thing) because he didn’t have to worry too much about the fact that he was probably being really obvious about how hot he found it when Max was grabbing his jersey and celebration.

But the happiness soon turned to overwhelming sadness as Germany lost on penalties and Leon saw Max on the ground practically sobbing as some of the coaching staff tried to comfort him. Never had the distance between them been more torturous. Leon’s mother looks over at him, but doesn’t say anything, sensing this is something Leon needs to work through on his own, and knowing nothing she could say would make it easier for him.

The thing that truly makes Leon break is when Max gets on the podium to receive his medal. The camera pans along the team and he sees something grey in Max’s hand.

A jersey.

His jersey.

Oh.

Leon feels the tears instantly prickle at the back of his eyes, even though he didn’t know why because he wasn’t entirely sure was he was feeling. All he could do was stare at the TV screen shocked that Max would even think to do this for him.

“He must really love you,” his mother says quietly, and that’s kinda it isn’t it? Leon swallows roughly and blinks back the tears threatening to fall down his cheeks. He doesn’t want to cry. He wasn’t to keep it together right now and not look like an over emotional baby disappointed about a loss. That’s not what it was, but it was what it would look like.

He takes a deep breath.

“I love him. I love him so much. I worked that out in Brazil. But I don’t know if he loves me back,” Leon whispers so quietly he’s surprised his mother hears him. “I know he cares, but I don’t know if he loves me, you know,” Leon says, and tha’s the moment the first tear escapes from his eyes.

His mother shifts closer to him, pulling him under her arm the same way she would when Leon was a child and upset to have lost a game. 

“I don’t know sweetie, I’ve never met him,” she says with a slight point to her tone that anyone else would have missed. “But what I see there is a boy who despite being devastated still thought of you. I don’t know him to say if it’s love, but you’re clearly very, _very_ special to him”.

It’s a good thing Leon’s mother has always been good at keeping a secret, because it means no one will ever have to know that he left her blue shirt wet from the tears that fell from his face. A month of crazy emotions finally caught up with him in that moment and he let it all out, crying it all out onto his poor mother as she stroked his back and hugged him like Leon was seven years old all over again. He finally manages to compose himself.

"Does it bother you," Leon asks quietly. 

"What do you mean?" Leon's mother asks.

"That it's him, and not a girl that I can be with publicly and you could tell your friends about and something you don’t have to think is......," 

"No sweetheart, stop that," his mother says gently but firmly, pushing Leon off her gently to sit him up so he's looking at her.

"All I care about is that you're happy. And if he makes you happy and is good to you, I couldn't care less if he's a boy or if he’s your teammate or whatever. You have to be careful, because some people won’t think that way, but all I want is for you to be happy, Leon". 

Leon wipes at his eyes, quietly mumbling a thank you to her. Only when his mother is satisfied he is OK, does she tell him that she has to get going because she needs to be awake early in the morning. Leon nods and bids her goodbye with a hug. 

“Bring him around to meet us,” his mother says as she gets up from Leon’s couch, leaning down to kiss him on the head as he sits on the couch.

"I will," he says. 

Leon is left alone with his thoughts as he tries to fall asleep that night, his brain racing with everything that has happened, what his mother said, and the anticipation of Max being back on his doorstep late tomorrow night. 

Max does make him happy, happier than he ever thought possible. These past few days since the injury should have been some of the worst of his life, but with Max right there with him, it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. Even when there was an entire ocean between them and he wasn't physically there, Leon never stopped feeling like Max was right there next to him. And having Max right there next to him made Leon feel like that no matter what, things would always be OK.

-*- 

 **From Max Meyer (23:10):**  u up?

 **From Leon Goretzka (23:11):**  Depends who's asking.......

 **From Leon Goretzka (23:11):**  If it's you......yes ;-)

 **From Max Meyer (23:12):**  good, see u in twenty

 **From Max Meyer (23:12):**  

Max rings Leon's doorbell twenty-six minutes later, and Leon thanks the universe for letting his shoulder be all but healed because it means he doesn't have to worry about hurting himself when he immediately throws his arms around his boyfriend. Max laughs, hugging him back before wriggling slightly free of Leon's grasp so he can climb onto the tip of his toes to kiss him, softly at first before deepening the kiss and dragging Leon’s lip gently though his teeth as he pulls back.

"Missed you," he says with a small smile and a light trace of his fingertips across Leon's back. 

"I know, because me too," Leon replies, pulling Max through the hallway and into the living room.  

Max apologises for not coming around straight away, explaining that his parents insisted on seeing the medal straight away and would have killed him if he didn't come around right away.

Leon laughs at this, knowing his parents would have had the same reaction. 

“Can I see it?”

Max hesitates for a moment and it’s only then he realised what he said and how insensitive it was to mention it. Leon should have had a medal too, fuck, if Leon was there, it probably would have been gold instead of silver. Max looks down at his feet, cursing himself for being such a goddamn asshole when he is drawn out of his thoughts by the soft sound of Leon’s voice.

“Max, I want to see it, please, it’s ok,” Leon reassures his boyfriend. 

He’s not just saying it to appease him. Sure, it hurts a little he couldn’t be there and that his shoulder got fucked up, but he’s still proud of the team. And besides, he is curious if the ribbon looks nicer in person than it does in the pictures and on the TV. It kinda looked like a bit of an ugly fluorescent hot mess on the television screen the night before. 

Thankfully Max doesn’t make him try and convince him further, pulling the medal out of his jacket pocket like it's a 5 Euro bill he doesn’t care about. He gives it to Leon who handles it like it’s made of glass, a fragile treasure from Brazil, not wanting to tarnish it in any way. It’s bigger than he thought it would be, and the bright colours of the ribbon do look a lot nicer in person than they did in the pictures, even if they are not the colours Leon would have used for an Olympic medal. 

“I’m proud of you,” he says, handing the medal back to Max who looks at it with a downtrodden expression.

His parents had fussed over him and said they were proud of him and that the medal felt like gold to them, but Max knew they were just saying that because they didn’t want to rub salt into the wound. Everyone knew Silver medals were what they gave to the losers, and that's what they were. Max was the captain, sure, he scored, but he didn't do enough and they  _lost_. 

“But I lost Leon, I fucking failed” he said so quietly Leon almost didn’t hear him.

It was the first time he’d let himself say it out loud.

Max looks like he is going to cry again, the same way he did the night before on the pitch.

“Come on, don't cry. I’m still proud of you,” Leon tells him softly, pulling Max into a hug against his chest and Max squeezes his eyes shut and buries his face in Leon’s chest to fight off the tears that threaten to fall.

"You didn't fail me," Leon remind him. 

“Thank you,” Max says into Leon’s chest. He isn’t sure Leon even caught it but the kiss he feels on the top of his head tells Max that he did hear him. It was a pretty pathetic response, but Max didn’t really know what else to say. He breathes deeply a few times and only when he’s certain he isn’t going to cry does he pull back from Leon’s hold.

“I have something for you,” he tells Leon, going back into the hallway to to pull something out of the small messenger bag he had brought with him. He holds it behind his back as he walks back into the living room to Leon.

He stands in front of Leon and takes a deep breath, before hanging his boyfriend the jersey with his name on the back that he had held up during the medal presentation in Brazil.

“I know it’s not a gold medal but…..….” Max trails off, hoping Leon understands the unspoken words that Max can’t get out because his throat is threatening to choke up on him.

Leon breathes in sharply, his fingers tracing over his name on the grey material. 

"Thank you," he says quietly. It doesn't hurt nearly as much as he thought it would to hold the jersey in his hands. “You didn’t have to do that, but it means a lot to me that you did,” Leon tells him. Max knew that Leon had seen it, he’d liked the picture Max posted on instagram, but this was the first time he’d actually gotten to talk to him about it. He wished he could be more articulate, but words were escaping him now Max and the jersey were in front of him.

“I wanted to,” Max says. “You were our captain, I was just filling in for you. And I wanted you there, however little way I could because I just….I nee….wanted you there and I…..Leon, it wasn't the same without you and I missed you and.....yeah,”.

Leon has never heard Max  _babble_  like that before.

He looks up from the GORETZKA printed on the back of the shirt in his hands to see Max looking at him like there’s something he wants to say but doesn’t quite know how.

He’s  _beautiful_.

Even right now, when he’s tired and his eyes a little bleary and bloodshot and his hair unstyled and sticking up like an alpaca, he’s beautiful. And even with the dumb tattoo on his arm that Leon doesn’t like but would never admit to not liking, and the stupid ripped jeans he's wearing, he’s the most beautiful thing in the entire damn fucking world and Leon would never get sick of looking at him.

Before he even realises what he’s doing he’s saying it.

“I love you”.

Max’s eyes widen a little and his lips separate a little like he can’t believe what he’s just heard.

“You do?” he says softly.

Leon hopes he hasn’t fucked it up and creeped Max out by saying the words too soon.

Even though he’s not sure he’s done the right thing, Leon nods, because even though it slipped out earlier than he intended to say it, he's never been more certain of anything in his life. 

He loves Max. And it's as simple as that. 

“I do. I fucking love you, so much it scares me,” Leon says.

Max’s lips curl into a smile.

“Good because like, I love you too you know,” Max says before grabbing a fistful of Leon’s shirt to pull Leon down to kiss him, the same way he did a few weeks ago when this whole thing between them started. Max pushes Leon up against the wall, kissing him like his life depends on it and Leon still has the jersey in his right hand and brings the left to rest on Max’s ass. 

Leon gently breaks away from the kiss because he needs to breathe. He looks down at Max and the sight greeting him is something else. His blonde hair is rumpled, his cheeks flushed pink, lips swollen and slick with spit, parted as be breathes heavily.

“No you don’t understand, Max. I mean I  _LOVE_  you, I’m not just saying this lightly even though I blurted it out, I mean that. It’s only you. Do you know how much I missed you? How important you are to me? I want you there in my life and I want to be next to you even when you’re having a shit day and I…..maybe one we’ll have a house we'll live in together and we'll get a Christmas Tree together and decorate it and like....this sort of stuff is what I want.......I want you there every day for the rest of my fucking life you know? You're  _it_  for me and I don't know how else to say it". 

Max fights the urge to cut him off, sensing this is something Leon has to get off his chest so he can process the feelings that have been building up inside of him. Max knows because he spent the past few days doing the same thing, processing the fact he was fucking in love with Leon.

"Leon.....are you done?"

Leon nods hesitantly, worried he's somehow made it worse with his blabbering. 

“I know that’s what you mean because that’s what I mean too,” Max says softly.

He takes a deep breath, making sure he has Leon's attention before continuing.  

“I never thought I wanted something like this until the morning after we first hooked up. But I came down into the kitchen and you handed me that plate with the bagels on it that I know you made for yourself. But you gave them to me because I said I was starving and you got me my Nutella and you looked at me like I was the most beautiful thing you'd ever seen and that was it,” Max says with a blush in his cheeks.

He's not good with talking about feelings, but if Leon needs him to talk about his feelings to know he is serious about this, then talking about his feelings that's what Max will do. Besides, it's not that scary when the person you're confessing to is looking at you with a soft, happy smile as you speak. 

“I realised that maybe I could have that every day. I mean, we were close before but you know. And it was like something clicked…..and I could wake up next to you every day and have breakfast with you instead of these people I don't know and never see again and…..that was something I realised I wanted. I never thought I wanted it, until I realised that maybe, I could have it with you. And then when you left Brazil and I went back upstairs by myself, I realised how like, ok this sounds corny but, I realised that I didn’t want to spend another day of my life without you being a part of it and that….yeah I loved you,” Max takes a step forward trace his fingers down Leon’s arm, breathing in before finishing.

"Leon. I love you. I……..love you. I know exactly what I’m saying. It's you ok? You know how they say there's that one person in your life? Well, I found that person. It's you."

Leon doesn't want to cry again like he did the day before on his mother's shirt, so he quickly leans down to kiss Max senseless, pulling him so close into his body it's a miracle Max isn't crushed by Leon’s arms around him.

Leon pulls back and looks down at Max again, and it's the corniest thing Leon's ever let caught himself thinking, but he is so  _lucky_. 

“Will you do something for me?” Leon asks him.

“Anything,” Max answers, his cheeks flushing even pinker at how quickly he’d replied. But with the way Leon was holding him against his body and looking down at him like he was the only thing on the planet that mattered and with that slightly crooked smile Max adored, well, Max really would do anything Leon asked him to.

Leon’s eyes darken as he takes a step back and holds the jersey out to Max.

“Would you put it on and let me fuck while you wear it”.

Max’s brain short circuits because  _holy fucking shit_  that is the hottest thing he’s ever heard someone say.

He didn’t know this it was a thing he wanted but now Leon has mentioned it, he  _needs_  it. He’s been waiting two weeks to for Leon to finally fuck him properly and his boyfriend somehow came up with a way to make it even hotter.

He smirks and strips off his jacket and shirt before taking the jersey out Leon’s hand.

“This?” he says with a wink, “is one of the many reasons why I fucking love you". 

**Author's Note:**

> Proofreading 20k is HARD and apologies for any errors I haven't caught. I'll reread this again in a few days and correct any I find then.


End file.
